Crime

The hacktivist group Anonymous has placed the Indian River County, Florida, Sheriff's Department on notice that it is coming to the defense of Kaitlyn Hunt, a teen who was kicked out of school and arrested for a lesbian relationship with a younger girl.

According to Mother Jones, Hunt reportedly had a brief lesbian relationship with a 15-year-old teammate on her school's girls' basketball team. Hunt was 17 at the time, but after she turned 18, the other girl's parents had her expelled from school and called the police.

The 15-year-old girl never complained about the consensual relationship, but Hunt was charged with "lewd and lascivious battery of a child 12-16 years old," per the Examiner.com.

Kaitlyn's mother, Kelly Hunt Smith, wrote on Facebook last Friday: "We need justice in this situation, not to feed into these parents' hates and insanity."

In response, Anonymous launched the Twitter hashtag #OPJustice4Kaitlyn and offered a press release that said: "The truth is, Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement."

Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar insisted on Monday: "If this was an 18-year-old male and a 14-year-old girl, it would be prosecuted in the same way," but admitted "when you have vocal victims, that enhances the case as well."

Sheriff Loar told reporters that he'd never heard of Anonymous, which has revealed embarrassing personal information about its targets, hacked government websites and brought down corporate sites.

So far Anonymous is playing it nice, only promising a petition and protests before things could get nasty.

Today, the Indian River County Sheriff's Department released phone calls between Hunt and her ex-teen lover, reported WPTV-TV (video below). The phone calls are redacted and feature only Hunt's voice declaring her love for the girl.

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